Sitefinity development environment and source code control

Question

There are some queries for which we need resolution before we purchase sitefinity 5.0 license. I would really appreciate if could get answers to these

1. What are the recommended guidelines to setup the sitefinity project in the source control? If there 4 to 5 developers working on the project, what should be the starting point in setting up the initial codebase? Do every developer has to create the sitefinity website and DB on their dev-boxes?
2. Is it recommend to setup a common DB for the sitefinity website where all the dev-machine would be connecting to do the development, if not what is the alternative approach?
3. Is there any online documentation available related to build and release of sitefinity web applications, other than publishing from within the visual studio?

Thanks Gaurav

Answer 1

We've been developing with Sitefinity since version 2, with multiple developers.

To answer your questions specifically:

1. Have a single developer (ideally your lead dev) create a clean sitefinity visual studio solution on their local machine. Check it into your source control repository and have each additional developer pull down a copy from there. You're now all in sync.

2. In terms of database location, two approaches work - either have each person run a local database, and in the web.config setup the connection string location as . (i.e. local). That way no one needs to check out the web.config to run it. Otherwise use a common development/testing server for the database. We've found the easiest way is to each have a local DB, unless multiple devs are working on very specific tasks together at the same time.

3. I have not seen any online documentation related to building outside of visual studio. If you have TFS or a MS build server, it should work fine as well.

In general, there is nothing 'special' about Sitefinity's architecture that separates it from any other .NET / MSSQL solution. Best practice that falls under these technologies still applies.